Chapter 18
Huan Zheng took a long breath—a breath that felt like swallowing ashes from a fire that had died out centuries ago—then he continued in a voice that suddenly became flatter, emptier, like someone reading a list of names engraved on an unclaimed tombstone.
"But there's something strange, Miss Poison. After the Harmony Conflict ended, after humanity celebrated their victory with revelry that lasted seven days and seven nights in the capital of the universe… The Lazy One and The Singer disappeared. Not dead—because no one dared to claim they had killed them. Not hiding—because no one could find their traces. They simply… vanished. Like mist swallowed by the morning sun. Meanwhile, The Silent One remained, still present at every victory ceremony, at every execution of captured Goddesses, at every ratification of new anti-god laws."
Ling Xu blinked, sensing something off in the way Huan Zheng said the word "disappeared"—like someone speaking of an old friend who had left without farewell—and she couldn't hold back her question.
"And the other human heroes? The ones who fought on the front lines?"
Huan Zheng smiled—a smile that didn't reach his eyes—then answered in a lazily forced tone.
"Some of them disappeared as well. Others chose to remain silent in corners of the universe beyond the reach of maps. Some became farmers on remote planets, others scavengers in forgotten corridors of time. No one knows exactly why. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they were sickened. Maybe they saw something behind the curtain of victory that they never wanted to see again."
He shrugged, then turned away from the cliff's edge, and behind him, Ling Xu could only remain silent, a thousand questions lodged in her throat.
Inside his mind, Huan Zheng let his inner voice murmur.
Not in ordinary words, but in vibrations that felt like the surface of a lake at midnight—still, cold, deep, and immeasurable.
"We did not want to fight," he murmured, and for a moment, he could smell again the bitter tea in the old bamboo pavilion, where he and The Singer—his childhood friend who had always been by his side like a shadow that never left, even though his heart had never beaten for her—sat together with divine envoys who offered peace.
"We chose the path of peace. Not because we were afraid to lose. Not because we were weak. But because we knew—we had seen it ourselves—that war never ends in victory. War only ends when one side is too exhausted to keep killing, and the other too shattered to keep fighting."
He remembered the faces of those divine envoys.
Not majestic gods seated on golden thrones with crowns of stars, but lesser gods with weary eyes and slumped shoulders, who also did not want to fight, who only wished to live in peace without having to choose between killing or being killed.
"But humanity's victory," Huan Zheng's inner voice continued, now trembling with a tone he had never shown Ling Xu, "did not come with peace. Humanity's victory came with depravity."
He let those memories flow like blood from wounds that never healed.
Memories of hundreds of Goddesses.
Not warrior goddesses, not ones clad in armor and wielding swords, but ordinary goddesses who were only skilled in mixing medicine, tending gardens, singing lullabies to star-children—violated one by one by human soldiers drunk on victory and rage, in the very same city square where they had celebrated for seven days and seven nights.
"Their heads were severed afterward," Huan Zheng murmured more deeply, his voice like ice cracking under unbearable weight, "not as punishment, not as justice—but as… collections. As proof that humanity had won, that the gods had fallen, that there was nothing left to respect, nothing left to fear, nothing left to treat as beings with hearts of their own."
And among the faces of the goddesses that surfaced in his memory, one appeared clearer than the rest—a woman with silver-white hair like Ling Xu's, with equally gentle eyes, with the same soft smile.
Ling Xu's mother.
He had never met the woman directly, but he could feel—from the aura clinging to Ling Xu's body, from the way she hid her hatred deep within the corners of her eyes—that her death had not been quick, not honorable, but slow and humiliating at the hands of humans who should have been enemies in battle, not executioners in the dark.
Two days later, as the sun above the eastern harbor began to sink like a broken yolk along the horizon, Ling Xu and Huan Zheng finally set foot at the gates of Pearl Dragon City.
Not by walking along the ocean floor as Ling Xu had imagined, but by riding a bubble carriage pulled by six glowing seahorses, gliding through ocean trenches as dark as wet velvet, until suddenly before them stretched a city built entirely from giant pearls and luminous coral, with white sandy streets gently swept by warm ocean currents.
"Welcome, Traveling Physician and her Guardian," greeted a middle-aged woman wearing a crown of red coral.
The Ocean Queen herself had descended from her throne to welcome them at the palace gates, her voice like the song of whales translated into words.
"We have heard your names echo through every ocean current, every whisper of waves, every prayer of fishermen on the brink of drowning."
Ling Xu bowed politely, but Huan Zheng merely yawned.
The palace guards then escorted them to rest in a guest pavilion located in a coral garden behind the palace.
A structure shaped like a giant shell, open at the top so that the bioluminescent glow of marine plankton could drift in like fallen stars at the bottom of the sea.
"You may stay here for as long as you wish," said a maid with a half-fish body, placing a tray of sea fruits Ling Xu had never seen before—some shaped like stars, some emitting golden light, some pulsing gently like tiny hearts.
"News from the surface says that human cultivators are currently resting. They have just completed the fifteenth wave of assaults on universes still inhabited by surviving gods—gods who fled after the Harmony Conflict, who hid in the darkest corners of existence, who still breathe even though the world has decided they deserve to die."
Three weeks passed in Pearl Dragon City like a dream too sweet to remember.
Huan Zheng, who usually only moved when forced, suddenly became a frequent sight at a tavern near the central market, sitting cross-legged on silk cushions while laughing freely with fishermen and sea merchants, his messy hair now adorned with small coral braids gifted by local girls with sparkling eyes—and every time Ling Xu came to fetch him with a worried expression, Huan Zheng would simply raise his cup and say,
"Relax, Miss Poison. You're too tense. Look—it's safe here. No one wants to kill us. No one wants to steal your shard. You can stop being an executioner for a while."
To be continued…